On May 17th [2010], a black-tie audience at the
Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall,
jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the
seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre,
and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity
as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently
donated $2.5 million toward the company's upcoming season,
and had given many millions before that ...

In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family
that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal
government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch
owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate,
headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues
are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company
has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died,
in 1967, and the brothers took charge.

The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas,
and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles
of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels,
Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet,
and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the
second-largest private company in the country, after
Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made
David and Charles Koch ... among the richest men in
America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion
dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and
Warren Buffett.

The Kochs ... believe in drastically lower personal and
corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and
much less oversight of industry, especially environmental
regulation.

These views dovetail with the brothers' corporate
interests. In a study released this spring, the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst's Political Economy Research
Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air
polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a
report identifying the company as a 'kingpin of climate
science denial.' The report showed that, from 2005 to
2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money
to organizations fighting legislation related to climate
change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think
tanks, and political front groups ...

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public
Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, "The Kochs
are on a whole different level. There's no one else who
has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is
what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking,
political manipulation, and obfuscation. I've been in
Washington since Watergate, and I've never seen anything
like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."

A few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala, the advocacy
wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation [AFP],
an organization that David Koch started in 2004, held a
different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th [2010]
weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American
Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin ...

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served,
in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists
in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist
uprising against vested corporate power. "Today, the
voices of average Americans are being drowned out by
lobbyists and special interests," it said. "But you can
do something about it." The pitch made no mention of its
corporate funders ...''

Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring
Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back
their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site
was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the "ground zero
mosque." This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington,
where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America,
Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to "reclaim the
civil rights movement" (Beck's words) on the same spot
where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly
47 years earlier ...

There's just one element missing from these snapshots of
America's ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist
uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it,
and have been doing so since well before the "death
panel" warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters
rule. You've heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The
other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even
richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even
those carrying the Kochs' banner may not know who these
brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas,
like Murdoch's, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to,
the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the
political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be
in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power,
and given the recession-battered electorate's unchecked
anger and the Obama White House's unfocused political
strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the
historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled "Invisible Hands"
in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate
players who have financed the far right ever since the du
Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934
to bring down F.D.R.

[The stakes for the kleptocracy are higher than ever --
the Kazakh oil of central Asia, and the chance to make
Afghanistan another Congo. For more on the U. S.
invasion of Afghanistan and the Unocal pipeline, see
www.avonhistory.org/mil3/bush08.htm#1995]

You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League's
crusade against the New Deal "socialism" of Social
Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and
child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater
assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed
juggernaut against our "socialist" president.

Only the fat cats change -- not their methods and not their
pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor,
and government "handouts" to the poor, unemployed, ill
and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain
fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the
1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products,
from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont's portfolio
of paint and plastics.

Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch
brothers' father, Fred, was among the select group chosen
to serve on the Birch Society's top governing body. In
a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of
Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of "a takeover"
of America in which Communists would "infiltrate the
highest offices of government in the U.S. until the
president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us." That
rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the
spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait
of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her
article caused a stir among those in Manhattan's liberal
elite who didn't know that David Koch, widely celebrated
for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich
conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans
for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with
some understatement, "has worked closely with the Tea
Party since the movement's inception."

To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater
at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet,
it's startling to learn that the Texas branch of that
foundation's political arm, known simply as Americans
for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to
an activist who had called President Obama "cokehead
in chief."

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is
Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for
Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this
weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound
Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from
Koch family foundations.

Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled
foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much
of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure
doesn't include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and
$4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political
action committee, putting it first among energy company
peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to
nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate
the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the
Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch's
Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of
Mayer's blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise
of her article (titled "Covert Operations") by conceding
that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any
factual errors in her 10,000 words ...

When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice
president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1
percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of
Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare
but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools --
in other words, any government enterprise that would either
inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes.

He hasn't changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported
lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at
the center of climate-science denial -- a cause that
forestalls threats to Koch Industries' vast fossil fuel
business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals
like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries
has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection
Agency from classifying another product important to
its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a "known carcinogen"
in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs' detestation of taxes,
big government and Obama. But there's a difference between
mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts
completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street
or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental
government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed,
public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of
the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the
G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members
of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the
House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like
Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block,
Alaska's anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin
protégé, Joe Miller.

Their program

opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection
to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to
corporations and the superrich [or spending trillions
fighting oil wars for the kleptocrats and enriching war
contractors];

apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and
derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a
"slush fund";

opposes the extension of unemployment benefits;

and calls for a freeze on federal regulations
in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining,
pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others)
have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank
knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting
their selfish interests ...

When wolves of Murdoch's ingenuity and the Kochs' stealth
have been at the door of our democracy in the past,
Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt's
triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty
League as a Republican ally eager to "squeeze the worker
dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into
the refuse pail." ...''

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 29,
2010, on page WK8 of the New York edition.

The U.S. now has the greatest disparity between the rich
and the poor within Western industrialized countries,
new Census data show. Timothy Noah of Slate magazine and
Howard University professor Roderick Harrison look at the
growing income gap in America.

GWEN IFILL: Next: a look at the growing problem of
inequality in America.

A new analysis out today showed the recession magnified
the gap between the richest and poorest to the widest
margin since the census began counting. Last year, the top
fifth of Americans, who earn more than $100,000 a year,
received nearly 50 percent of all income in the U.S.,
while the bottom 20 percent received just 3 percent. The
U.S. also has the greatest disparity between rich and poor
among Western industrialized nations.

We look at that gap and what's driving it now with writer
Timothy Noah, who just completed a series on the topic for
"Slate" magazine, and Howard University professor Roderick
Harrison, who studies census data for the Joint Center
for Political and Economic Studies.

Welcome to you both. Tim Noah, you write in "Slate" about
the great divergence. Describe what you mean.

TIMOTHY NOAH, Slate.com: It's a ... three-decade trend
that began in the late 1970s, a trend towards income
inequality.

Incomes have been growing less and less equal since
1979. A lot of people accept that as the norm, but, in
fact, for much of the 20th century, the trend was going
the other way. Between 1929 and the early 1970s, incomes
were becoming more and more equal.

And, of course, right in the middle of that period, you
had a great deal of prosperity after World War II.

GWEN IFILL: Professor Harrison, what -- what is the cause
of this?

RODERICK HARRISON, Joint Center for Political and
Economic Studies: The underlying cause is that the
gains in productivity have been divided more towards
corporate earnings and profits than towards the workers
and employees.

If we had maintained the historical levels and share of
sharing productivity gains, the middle- and lower-income
portions of the income distribution would have fared much
better, and you wouldn't see this acceleration in the gap.

GWEN IFILL: But we didn't maintain it. What was the reason
for that?

RODERICK HARRISON: Well, I mean, again, you have a gain
in productivity. You're producing more per worker.

If that goes primarily to profits, which it has in recent
decades, wages are not increasing due to that gain in
productivity. The workers, the employees are not benefiting
from it. And wages and the earnings have in fact stagnated
over much of this period.

So, if more of that had flowed to the large number
of people in the work force, you would have had some
increases. We have had great increases in productivity
over the period. You would have much greater increases in
the earnings and wages and much less of a gap.

GWEN IFILL: So, Tim, we know we're coming out of ...
out of a recession, but people feel like we're still
in one. Is that the cause or the effect of this kind of
divergence we see?

TIMOTHY NOAH: The divergence is ... has been going on a
very long time. So, the divergence doesn't have anything
to do with the recession.

It does appear that, during this recession, what we have
seen is a new, at least short-term, one hopes short-term,
effect, which is a huge surge in the poverty rate. We
haven't seen an increase like this since the mid-1990s.

TIMOTHY NOAH: Exactly. What the trend ... has been since
the early 1990s has been that incomes at the top has just
been skyrocketing. The top -- we're talking about the top
1 percent and especially the top 0.1 percent.

Emmanuel Saez, who won a MacArthur grant today, did some
pioneering research on this at Berkeley.

GWEN IFILL: And he found exactly the same thing?

TIMOTHY NOAH: ... this went unnoticed for a long time
because social scientists were looking at census data,
which is not very precise.

GWEN IFILL: Right.

TIMOTHY NOAH: Saez and his co-author, Thomas Piketty,
looked at IRS data, and were able to get a much sharper
picture of this increase.

GWEN IFILL: Professor Harrison, can we talk about the
demographics of this? Who is affected the most? Is it an
urban-vs.-rural construct, male-vs.-female, racial?

RODERICK HARRISON: If you look over the three or so
decades, clearly, most rural areas have been left out of
the economic growth of the country, particularly during the
'90s. That great expansion left many of those areas behind.

Some of the sharpest differences are between the less well
educated and the college educated. College-educated
have shown gains. And particularly where you have
college-educated husbands and wives, mothers and fathers,
those families have gained. The income opportunities for
less-well-educated workers have not kept pace.

GWEN IFILL: Another part of this -- and a lot of
people have talked about this education gap, but people
have talked less about -- or at least there have been
assumptions made about immigration as an effect or trade
policy. Jobs are being outsourced to other countries. Is
that part of this as well?

TIMOTHY NOAH: Well, immigration -- as far as economists
have been able to determine so far, immigration has not
been a major factor, ... except with regard to the very
poor, the bottom 10 percent -- people who do not graduate
from high school have suffered as a result of immigration.

But the middle class, whose income stagnation is really
the defining factor of what I call the great divergence ...
was unaffected by immigration.

GWEN IFILL: But how about taxation? There's a lot of
discussion now, and we have been having it on this program,
about the effect of taxes, raising them or lowering them,
on people's well-being. Is that also driving this divide,
or is there any evidence to suggest?

RODERICK HARRISON: The Bush tax cuts, and particularly
the debate over the top 2 percent, certainly increases
some of this ...

GWEN IFILL: But that's just been the last few years.

RODERICK HARRISON: It's not the driving force, ... This
has been going on for decades, and independently of tax
policy. And it's part of really the restructuring of
the economy.

There is one thing I would like to mention I think is
very important. The relationship of this to the recession
might be -- and Robert Reich is making this argument --
the suppressed incomes of lower- and middle-income people
meant that people were maintaining their living standards
by credit and borrowing.

That was unsustainable. And that's part ... of the
difficulty with climbing out of the recession is these
relatively flat incomes.

GWEN IFILL: If this is a trend which is now decades-long,
this growing, widening gap, is it an arrestable trend? Is
there some policy or some personal responsibility that
people need to take to dig themselves out of this kind
of hole?

TIMOTHY NOAH: It's hard to point to any one individual
thing. Obviously, improving the education system would
help, because we really need to be producing more high
school graduates than we're producing. The work force
doesn't seem to be meeting the education level required
by employers.

But -- I know this sounds glib, but electing Democrats to
the White House seems to help. There was a very interesting
study done by a Princeton political scientist where he
looked at administrations going back to 1948. And he found
exact opposite trends under Democrats and Republicans.

GWEN IFILL: Because of government -- because of government
policies, ideology?

TIMOTHY NOAH: Because of a whole range of government ...
policies. Democrats were much more favorable to people at
lower incomes than Republicans.

GWEN IFILL: And, finally, what do you think can arrest
this trend?

RODERICK HARRISON: I think the distribution of increases
in productivity is the key. If ... we have had great,
substantial gains in productivity. If we maintain those,
but if we distribute the benefits of that more widely
across the work force, you would start to see a leveling
out ... That would ... broaden the consumer base and give
some strength.

GWEN IFILL: Professor Roderick Harrison of the Joint
Center for Political and Economic Studies, and Tim Noah for
"Slate" magazine, thank you both very much ...''

``Pelosi: Democrats Expect to Keep House Majority,
'Battle-Tested' for Campaign

SUMMARY

In an interview with Judy Woodruff, Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi predicts Democrats will retain a majority
in the House despite a hostile political environment
and weighs in on the battle over extending Bush-era tax
cuts ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, thank you very
much for talking with us.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Virtually every respected political
analyst in this town, around the country, are saying the
Republicans are poised to take control of the House of
Representatives.

How worried are you?

REP. NANCY PELOSI: I think it's great that they think that,
but we are acting upon another possibility, and that is
that we will hold the House.

Our members left Congress last night very confident that
they would return in the majority. We take it one district
at a time. Nothing less is at stake than the choice between
going back to the exact agenda of the Bush administration
or moving America forward, and our members are ready for
the fight.

Again, we take it one district at a time. For some reason,
when they come here, they say, what's all this conversation
about in Washington? We don't see that in our districts.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The voters say the main issue on their
minds is jobs. What do you say to voters ... that make
them believe that Democrats are going to create more jobs
than Republicans, especially when the Democrats haven't
been able to do anything significant here in the last few
weeks about jobs?

REP. NANCY PELOSI: Well, the fact is, is that we have done
a great deal about jobs from day one. When President Obama
took office, immediately, one week and one day later,
we passed the ... Recovery Act, which created or saved
3.6 million jobs. And I want to add that, in the first
eight months of 2010 alone, more private-sector jobs were
created than in the eight years of the Bush administration.

So, we have to go tell our story and understand that this
is a choice. The American people love choice. And they will
have a choice in this election. And, so, in terms of jobs,
from day one, we've created or saved 3.6 million. The
job situation is not where we want it to be. We have to
do more.

That's why we have to get reelected to move forward,
instead of going back to the failed economic policies that
got us where we are in the first place.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I ask because voters keep raising jobs as
their main concern.

REP. NANCY PELOSI: That's right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The one thing many Democrats, though, think
that Congress should have done before adjournment is pass
middle-class tax cuts to accentuate the differences with
Republicans. The decision was made not to go for that
vote. Was that a miscalculation...

REP. NANCY PELOSI: No, not at all. It's a decision because
the fact is, our president got out there and talked about
giving a tax cut to all Americans, ... but he does not
agree that we should give an extra bonus to people making
over $250,000 a year. They, too, will get a tax cut under
President Obama's plan.

We support that. Our members are fully prepared to go home
and talk about what they support in it. It ... doesn't
require a vote to take a position on it. So, ... we are
very confident about the decisions that we have made,
about the priorities in legislation that we had passed,
health care reform for all Americans -- improving quality,
expanding coverage, lowering costs -- [and] Wall Street
reform. The list goes on.

Members are going home to talk about that, but also to
talk about the future, what is the choice. And one of
those choices is, ... do we give a tax cut to everyone
which creates jobs, or do we give a tax cut, a bonus to
the upper income, which will only add to the deficit? We're
not going to do that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of that, there are 47 House
Democrats, about a fifth of your Democratic Caucus, who
are urging you and the president to go along with extending
tax cuts on investments, like the capital gains tax ...

REP. NANCY PELOSI: ... We've probably passed 16 tax
considerations favorable to small businesses. But the
decision here and the distinction here is, do you want to
give a tax cut to all Americans which creates jobs, or do
you want to hold that tax cut hostage to giving an extra
tax cut to the high end which will take us $700 billion
into debt? ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... is there room, though, for compromise
on this -- tax cuts on investments that -- for people
who earn income through investments that create jobs,
up to a million dollars?

REP. NANCY PELOSI: Our position is clear. Everybody gets
a tax cut. If you make over $250,000 a year, you do not
get an extra tax cut.

Most of that tax cut, by the way, at the high end -- 80
percent of it goes to people making over a million dollars
a year as joint filers. So, we feel very clear about our
position: It's where jobs are created. It is not where
the deficit is increased ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: I know you believe and you've said the
Democrats are going to have the majority in the next
Congress...

REP. NANCY PELOSI: Right ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: When it comes to health care reform,
Madam Speaker, the Republicans are already talking about
it. They are saying, ... if we can't repeal it, we're at
least going to de-fund it ...

REP. NANCY PELOSI: Well, that's another reason why we must
win this election -- and we will -- because making health
care more affordable, accessible and higher-quality is
important to the American people.

Republicans want to de-fund stopping denial of coverage
because you have a preexisting medical condition, stopping
repeal of your policy because you become sick or because
you need an operation. The list goes on and on of very
positive initiatives -- which have already gone into effect
-- that the Republicans want to de-fund.

So, our members know that it was one thing to pass
historic health care reform. Now we have to make sure it
is enforced. The Republicans want to stand in the way of
that ...''

``Progressives are an impatient bunch. We fight for people
who have waited too long already -- for health care,
for educational opportunity, for jobs to keep them in the
middle class.

But for generations, conservatives have appealed to fear
to protect the privileged and preserve the status quo
-- fear of immigrants, fear of diversity, fear of big
government. For conservatives in 2010, it's easy:

"Stop."

"No."

"Repeal."

Meanwhile, for more than a century -- in churches and
temples, in union halls and neighborhood centers, in
the streets and at the ballot box -- progressives have
moved the country forward. Progressives brought us minimum
wage and Social Security in the 1930s, civil rights and
Medicare in the 1960s, and health care and Wall Street
reform in 2010.

Opponents of these accomplishments -- some of society's
most privileged and well-entrenched interest groups --
have not changed much. The John Birch Society of 1965
has bequeathed its fervor and extremism to the Tea Party
of 2010.

History tells us that rage on the right should not be
confused with populism. The far right attacks government
regulation as it feeds Wall Street and the insurance
companies. It rails against government spending for the
least privileged as it lavishes tax cuts favoring the
most privileged.

No one should be surprised over what has happened in the
last 18 months:

We passed health care reform, so the insurance
companies are coming after us at election time.

We enacted consumer protections for homeowners and
credit card users, so Wall Street is spending millions to
defeat us.

We worked to end tax breaks for corporations that ship
jobs overseas, and now large multinational corporations
are doing everything possible to beat us.

We already know the damage that comes from the right's
rage. During President Clinton's eight years, our country
added more than 22 million private sector jobs, incomes
went up, and we enjoyed the largest budget surplus in
U.S. history.

In the following eight years of the Bush administration,
only 1 million jobs were added, incomes stagnated or
plummeted for most Americans, and we were left with record
budget deficits.

Yet Republican candidates in 2010 are offering the same
faux populism and "solutions" of the Bush years: more tax
cuts for the rich, deregulation of special interests, and
trade agreements that cost us millions of manufacturing
jobs. And in places like my state of Ohio, they are even
offering up as candidates the same people who got us into
this mess.

To fight back, progressives must talk about the historic
accomplishments of the last 18 months in specific,
understandable terms:

We saved the U.S. auto industry in the face of
naysayers' exhortation to "let the market work," and our
efforts preserved hundreds of thousands of jobs.

We passed health care reform that improves drug
benefits for senior citizens, provides coverage to those
with a pre-existing condition, allows a 22-year-old
daughter home from college to stay on her parents'
insurance, and promises health care for millions of
Americans.

We made college more affordable for students and
passed historic legislation for our nation's veterans and
for equal pay for women.

If you have a 401(k), take a look at it today and
compare it with the day before President Obama was
inaugurated. Back then, 750,000 jobs were being lost each
month, with 22 consecutive months of job loss costing
8 million jobs. We've got a long ways to go, but this
year we've seen eight straight months of private sector
job growth.

``The 'Tea Party' stands for more for them and less for
the rest of us.

When I published an unflattering assessment of the Tea
Party movement ["Rabies on the Right," 6/1/10 TPP], I
anticipated a spirited response ... I admit they surprised
me ... Betraying a certain lack of media sophistication,
some assumed that I lived in the city where they happened
to read my essay, and threatened to pay a visit to my
house. Most of them signed their names, too.

My memory doesn't extend back to anything quite like this,
nothing so animated by rage yet devoid of content. As
a friend of mine wrote several years ago, everything's
like pro wrestling now, taunts and scowls, fantastic
narratives and pantomimes of violence, empty conflict
aimed at inflaming an audience of oafs.

And of course we're aware that the wife of the founder of
the World Wrestling Federation, herself a participant
in some of those preposterous ringside narratives,
is spending a fortune to win a US Senate seat in
Connecticut. One key difference is that most Tea Party
combatants come armed with deadly weapons, engineered
to shed real blood. Dialogue, as I learned dramatically,
is not their style.

But what sort of dialogue can we imagine with a fierce
minority virtually lobotomized by its gullibility, a
minority of bubble-dwelling reactionaries whose every
"fact" has been distorted or manufactured? ...

Nearly every city has its own instigator, its mini-Limbaugh
peddling bizarre conspiracy theories and assuring eager
racists that Barack Obama is a Muslim/communist/Antichrist
born in Kenya and educated by terrorist mullahs in an
Indonesian madrasah.

Most Tea Party mythology is so ridiculous that reasonable
people will grin and ignore it. Sometimes they do so
at their peril. Senator Lisa Murkowski, who passes for
a moderate conservative in her home state of Alaska,
lost the Republican primary to a Wild Right challenger
because, observers theorize, she failed to respond to a
fusillade of savage attack ads from the Tea Party Express
(the same kamikaze group supposedly expelled from the Party
for posting a grotesquely racist "satire" of the NAACP on
its blog).

"They literally accused her of almost everything
imaginable," one pollster reported. No doubt Murkowski
thought that answering them was like trying to answer
monkeys who scream and throw nuts and excrement from
the treetops. In the shadow of Sarah Palin, she should
have known better than to overestimate the intelligence
of Alaska's Republicans. In this age of reality-proof
information bubbles, lies and labels become deadly weapons.

The Tea Party's "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington
Aug. 28 [2010] was sponsored by the media demagogue Glenn
Beck, self-anointed messiah of America's meanest morons. It
was staged inappropriately, some say obscenely, at the
site and on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's
famous plea for civil rights, the speech remembered as
"I Have a Dream."

A throng of grizzled white insurgents cheered and whistled
as Beck and Palin, an odd couple of vulgarians waxing very
rich on their admirers' simplicity, appealed America's
fate to a Higher Power. They exhorted us to pray on our
knees for deliverance from socialism and recycled the
apocalyptic language of the tent revival ...

It was the late Fuhrer himself, a poor general but a
supremely successful demagogue, who wrote, "The great
masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a
big lie than to a small one." "Big government" is the
big lie that our Tea Party has swallowed whole, with a
hogwash chaser.

An overripe canard from the conservative Chamber of
Horrors, "big government" still works wonders with the
logically impaired. (Hitler also wrote "All propaganda has
to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least
intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.")

Did they notice that during the let-the-fat cats-feast
administrations of George W. Bush, there was never a word
about big government from the Glenn Beck section? Not even
when deficits soared, hopeless wars drained the treasury
and the White House expanded its powers in flat defiance
of the Constitution [and the kleptocrats sucked in
trillions for foreign oil, some of it coming back at us
as bullets and bombs] ...

The current "big government" wave of rightwing rhetoric
is about as populist, at heart, as a string of polo
ponies. It's the latest attempt by the plutocrats
[kleptocrats] to restore discipline to their stable of
safe politicians ...

Where does the Tea Party fit in? Old white men they may be,
but everyone knows that white men of the ruling class don't
wear t-shirts that say "Babies, Guns, Jesus." Past their
prime, lower-middle class but not entirely uneducated,
Tea Party soldiers may in some cases even understand that
the gap between America's richest 1% and the rest of us has
widened scandalously since 1980, and even more radically
since the Bush tax cuts and the market crash of 2008.

The United States of America has become a cruel
winner-take-all society. What sets it apart from
every other developed country ... is the huge number
of Americans who support that arrangement because they
believe, against all evidence, that they are, or could be,
among the winners ...

Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker that the Tea Party's
principal angels are the mega-billionaire Koch brothers,
David and Charles.

The Koch family, one of America's half-dozen wealthiest,
has been bankrolling the Far Right at least since the
brothers' late father committed his oil money to the John
Birch Society back in the 1950s. The Kochs, reactionary
royalty, control foundations and energy-industry PACs
that have lavished several hundred million dollars on the
Tea Party and other right-wing causes in the past decade
alone ...

All intelligent Americans, the ones who deplore it and the
ones who profit from it, are well aware of this populist
scam. Everyone except the aging warriors out marching in
the uniforms of the Continental Army. Their blindness is
a greater shame, as I see it, because the Tea Party gets
one very important thing right:

The system is broken. Awash in money and mendacity,
America's democracy is like a big animal that can't swim,
floundering and drowning in two feet of water. Cash and
slander rule -- huge wallets, huge lies. If you won't lie
and can't pay, you have no future in American politics.

If you aspire to public service, try to find a country
with a Supreme Court majority that doesn't spell "free
$peech" with a dollar sign. The Court's Citizens United
decision last January [2010] ... simply legitimized and
institutionalized everything that's most disgusting about
our system.

To grasp the absurdity and obscenity of equating free
corporate spending with free speech, visualize an actual
political gathering, and put it to the bullhorn test. The
crowd is huge, row after row, as far as the eye can
see. One candidate has a huge bullhorn that reaches the
back rows easily; his opponent has such a tiny bullhorn
that his voice is inaudible beyond the twentieth row. When
he asks why he can't use a big bullhorn, too, they tell
him "Because you can't afford it." Think that's unfair,
un-American? Tell it to the Supreme Court ...

No midterm election cycle has seen as many reckless big
spenders as this one. Candidates had spent $400 million
before the end of August, including unprecedented price
tags on the Meg Whitman ($104 million to date) and Carly
Fiorina campaigns in California.

Linda McMahon, the wrestling mogul, pledged to spend up
to $50 million, if necessary, for Connecticut's Senate
seat ... The Right loves to talk about the Founders
and original intent. Do they think the Founders meant to
auction off the highest offices to the highest bidder?

The Constitution never had a fighting chance against
billionaires' egos or the Koch brothers' brand of checkbook
democracy, which has frozen favored incumbents in office
and swallowed up both Democrats and Republicans. They
flip-flop in and out of power regardless of their failures
because voters have no memory and no real options; third
parties can never raise enough money to stop the revolving
door ...

From Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi industry to recalls
of shoddy pacemakers ... and still deregulation is a
passionate religion. The free-market Right raged against
regulators and environmentalists for decades, while
the government babied the oil industry with incestuous
concessions. Then came the BP disaster and oil spill,
right on schedule ...''

If you call $300 million "tiny," then yes, he inherited
a very tiny fortune ... Sure, he's a successful
businessman. But political ideology seems secondary;
he uses his financial assets to increase his financial
assets. The Kochs just slipped into whatever political
ideology would most directly benefit the morbidly wealthy.

As described in the article, the Kochs grew impatient with
trying to influence politics by bankrolling individual
politicians or setting up pseudo-science think tanks to
conduct the research that would influence policy makers
and enhance their business. So they began setting up a
series of 'grassroots' political organizations to invent
the anti-govt, anti-tax Tea Party-type movement, which
hadn't found any organic support before ...

Commentator 3

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public
Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, "The Kochs
are on a whole different level. There's no one else who
has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is
what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking,
political manipulation, and obfuscation. I've been in
Washington since Watergate, and I've never seen anything
like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."

Commentator 4

Do some simple math in your melon: Obama received MORE
SMALL donations than any other president, because MORE
OF US contributed to stop the demise of America. We WERE
spent into a flaming pit, in two wars, our banks failing,
industries failing, jobs evaporating and already in debt
when Obama was elected ...

Look back at every GOP president since Ike. They each
pass on debt and disarray to their successor, and then
attack the needed spending by the Dem cleaning up the
crime scene as a "tax and spend Democrat", when a more
accurate term would be the guy paying the bills for the
jackass Republican preceeding pres, that was a "borrow
and spend Republican" ...

Commentator 5

Why do the Kochs hide their investments into politics
behind so many little different recently invented
entities? They COULD just do it under Koch industries,
if they were NOT trying to be invisible?

Why would Dick Armey pretend he was NOT paid by the
Kochs? When did political donations, turn into buses
driving thugs all over the nation to disturb the peace
and intimidate public meetings? ...

Commentator 6

Missed by Jane Mayer in her New Yorker article -- as well
as by many other commentators -- is the fact that Charles
Koch was a member of the John Birch Society [JBS] until
May 1968. So it was not just Daddy Fred that found JBS
conspiracy theories alluring ...

Commentator 7

Consider the "tea bag" rebellion. No one professes more
hatred for the two-party, business-as-usual political
system in Washington than those angry Americans who're
caught up in the tea-bag rallies. Yet unbeknownst to
most of the mad-as-hellers who have showed up, it was
Republican-tied lobbyists and political functionaries who
cynically financed, organized and orchestrated the very
first tea-bag protest.

They have steadily co-opted the tea-bag faction to
make it a front for the corporate agenda, and many of
the tea-bag groups have devolved into subsidiaries of
the Republican Party -- fabricating and spreading fake
grass-roots organizations all across the country, including
Patients United Now (anti-health care reform), Hot Air
Tour (anti-global warming), Free Our Energy (pro-offshore
drilling), No Stimulus (tried to kill Obama's economic
recovery plan) and Save My Ballot Tour (tries to keep
workers from joining unions).

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you --
and they are! While such corporate elites as the Kochs are
a tiny minority of Americans, they are able to hide their
own selfish agenda behind front groups, surreptitiously
skewing our public debate, agenda and policies to
serve themselves. Ultimately, what they are out to get
is nothing less than America's essential uniting ethic
of the common good, replacing our democracy with their
corporate kleptocracy.

And as for that old Limbaugh line that it is 'class envy'
that makes Democrats think our taxation is UNFAIR, when
it is those who don't have a pot to pee in themselves,
who stick up for this totally one-sided Corporate and
Wealthy Welfare that the Republians give, waiting for
that wonderous day when maybe a couple dollars will ...
trickle down!''

WASHINGTON -- Desperate for jobs and cool toward
President Barack Obama, working-class whites are flocking
to Republicans, turning a group long wary of Democrats
into an even bigger impediment to the party's drive to
keep control of Congress.

An Associated Press-GfK Roper poll shows whites without
four-year college degrees preferring GOP candidates by
twice the margin of the last two elections, when Democrats
made significant gains in the House and Senate. The
poll, conducted last month, found this group favoring
GOP hopefuls 58 percent to 36 percent -- a whopping 22
percentage-point gap.

In 2008, when Obama won the presidency, they favored
GOP congressional candidates by 11 percentage points,
according to exit polls of voters. When Democrats won
the House and Senate in 2006, the Republican edge was 9
percentage points.

Compared with better-educated whites, working-class whites
tend to be older and more conservative -- groups that
traditionally lean Republican and are uneasy with the
young president's activist governing ...

Though accustomed to trailing among working-class whites,
Democrats can hardly afford further erosion from a group
that accounts for about 4 in 10 voters nationally. Their
GOP preference is in contrast to whites with college
degrees, who the AP-GfK Poll shows are split evenly
between the two parties' candidates, and to minorities,
who decisively back Democrats.

Many of these working-class voters were dubbed Reagan
Democrats in the 1980s, when some in the North and Midwest
who had previously preferred Democrats began supporting
conservative Republicans.

Many never warmed to Obama during the 2008 presidential
race ... They preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton, his
rival for the Democratic nomination, by 2-1 and in the
general election backed Republican nominee John McCain by
18 points ...

In the AP-GfK poll, working-class whites were likelier than
white college graduates to say their families are suffering
financially and to have a relative who's recently lost a
job ...

They are likelier than better-educated whites to dislike
Obama personally and are more negative about his leadership ...
Quinnipiac University polls show clear advantages
with this group for GOP Senate candidates in Florida,
Pennsylvania and Ohio ...

The AP-GfK Poll was conducted Sept. 8-13-10 by GfK Roper
Public Affairs & Corporate Communications and involved
landline and cell phone interviews with 1,000 randomly
chosen adults. The margin of sampling error is plus or
minus 4.2 percentage points. Included were interviews with
416 whites without college degrees, for whom the error
margin is plus or minus 6.6 points.

Commentator 8

The media can do a poll on anything, they can do a poll
on people who are overweight and ask if they support Obama
or no. Then publish as breaking news on CNN and say 65% of
fat people support Obama. and they can talk for weeks why
fat people support Obama. This poll thing is nonsense!!!

What you should be asking is what do Republicans have to
offer that they didn't in the last 8 years they were in
power. Or what new thing are they bringing?

Commentator 9

I voted for Bush twice ... Once because I believed
in his message. The second time because I thought that
he would follow through during his second term because
he wouldn't have to worry about being reelected. Not only
was I mistaken, but he became more of a party puppet the
second time around.

Lets not forget what Bush did: he took our economy from
surplus to massive deficit. When we were in a recession he
gave MASSIVE tax cuts which created a MASSIVE deficit?. and
by the way created a major trickle UP economy where the
rich got richer.

I had been telling people to watch out for the housing
bubble pop since 2005 simply because I noticed the mass
of realty signs building in front yards: and they weren't
moving. Then Bear Stearns died in March 2008, which was
a preview of what was to come in September 2008.

Bush waited for the bottom to fall out before attempting
anything. And then what did he attempt?

TARP

Yep, you know -- the solution everyone loves to point out
as being Obama's fault.

So, we're all sitting here unemployed, underemployed,
taking pay cuts or worried when any of those three things
will happen to us. and who got the 'bail out'? The big
boys. They did not learn their lesson with the Bush tax
cuts: the rich keep their money. Trickle down is a lie ...

Now all I hear out of Republicans are how bad Dems are
and empty promises. I say empty promises because when
you press them for how they will accomplish these goals,
they have no answers.

I guess I'm going to be kicked out of the white club
because I absolutely refuse to support a party of empty
promises whose only goal is to enrich themselves.''

Senator Rand Paul says he doesn't blame President Barack
Obama for the ongoing turmoil in Iraq and that former
Vice President Dick Cheney and other proponents of the
Iraq War should ask themselves the same questions Cheney
is raising now about the conflict.

"What's going on now -- I don't blame on President Obama,"
Paul said in an interview with NBC's David Gregory to air
on "Meet the Press" Sunday [6-22-14]. "Has he really got
the solution? Maybe there is no solution ..."

In an op-ed this week authored with his daughter Liz,
Cheney wrote of Obama that "rarely has a U.S. president
been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many."

Paul, a possible 2016 presidential candidate known for
his breaks with Republican defense [WAR] hawks on foreign
policy, said that Cheney's criticism of the president's
strategy should also be questioned.

Cheney is widely credited as a key architect of the 2003
war [and the increase in the price of oil from $25 per
barrel in 2003 to $125 per barrel in 2006; the owners of
oil wells made trillions at the expense of the American
people].

"I think the same questions could be asked of those who
supported the Iraq War," Paul said. "You know, were they
right in their predictions? Were there weapons of mass
destruction there? That's what the war was sold on.

Was democracy easily achievable?

Was the war won in 2005, when many of these people said
it was won? They didn't ... understand the civil war that
would break out."

[Senator Paul] added that the Iraq War has caused ongoing
chaos in the Middle East as well as the emboldening of
Iran. "Iran is much more of a threat because of the Iraq
War than they were before -- before there was a standoff
between Sunnis and Shiites. Now there is Iranian hegemony
throughout the region," he said.

``Senator-Elect Rand Paul said today that there needs to
be a national debate on Afghanistan, that Congress has
abdicated its role ...

During his interview with ABC, just before being questioned
by Stakeout, Paul called for cutting the military budget
as well as other federal programs ...

TRANSCRIPT

QUESTION: Senator-Elect, are there examples where Bush
exceeded proper limits of executive power in the "War on
Terror," and is Obama doing the same now?

PAUL: Well, I think that I would like to see when we go to
war that we declare war formally, and I think we should
go to war reluctantly, and I think we do as Americans
believe in a certain reluctance towards going to war,
but I think when we had a use of force resolution instead
of a declaration of war resolution, that lessened the
debate somehow, and I think it needs to be elevated to an
incredibly important plateau in order to discuss it.

[ Why do most Tea Partyers chose to ignore
Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution
which says that Congress has the
power "to declare war" not the executive
branch of government?]

So I will argue that when we go into hostilities, we
declare war formally and we don't do it with a use of
force resolution ...

QUESTION: Are we in violation of the Constitution? How
do you rectify that? And also in terms of Yemen and
Pakistan now?

PAUL: I think we need to have a debate over it, at the very
least, is we need to begin to debate. I don't think we're
even having the debate. So I think it's a step forward to
have the debate.''

``... "The challenge for conservatives is that
nation-building isn't conservative," said Christopher
Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the
libertarian Cato Institute. For the libertarians in the
Tea Party, he said, many will be skeptical of the prolonged
engagement in Afghanistan ...

Paul's father, Texas Republican Rep. Ron Paul, is an
opponent of the Afghanistan war and a lonely GOP member
of the Out of Afghanistan Caucus chaired by Democratic
Michigan Rep. John Conyers.

The elder Paul had a message to Tea Partiers, some of whom
see him as a leader in the movement, in an August magazine
column. "As many frustrated Americans who have joined the
Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government
at home while supporting it abroad," he wrote ...''

``... AMANPOUR: One of those aiming to make history is
Rand Paul, senator-elect from Kentucky, and he joins me
this morning. Welcome. Thank you for being here.

PAUL: Good morning.

AMANPOUR: In a way, it is, to coin a phrase,
historic. There's never been a Tea Party in modern
American history, and you are one of the prominent Tea
Partiers. What is your first aim once you get ... to
the Senate?

PAUL: I think the debt. We have to do something about
the debt. I think we've been fiscally irresponsible for
a generation or more here.

[A commentator wrote on 12-31-08:

``In an effort to paralyze the U. S. federal government,
just three presidents, Reagan and the Bushes, have incurred
most of our cureent $11 trillion national debt ..."]

AMANPOUR: ... Would you cut the military?

PAUL: Yes. Yes.

AMANPOUR: By how much? Obviously, Robert Gates has made
some suggestions.

PAUL: Well, I think it's hard ... the interest on the debt
now is going to approach ... what we spend in the national
defense budget ... We need to do something about it.

AMANPOUR: The question, again, is, exactly what? Because,
again, the Republicans in the campaign have come up with
$50 billion here, $100 billion there, a lot to you and me,
but in terms of reducing a $1.3 trillion [annual] deficit,
how does the math add up? ...

AMANPOUR: Afghanistan? Are you going to call for early
withdrawal there? ...

PAUL: Well, after 10 years, I think the Afghans need to
have stepped up more to do more. when I asked our G.I.s,
from Kentucky leaving the base, I said, "... Would
you rather the Afghans do more of the patrolling on
the streets?" Every one of these young brave men and
women will tell you, "Yes." So the mood is changing, even
within those who are the brave young men and women that
are serving our country ...''

--------------

[We would not be in Afghanstan another five minutes
if the men in black, and the kleptocrats they serve,
would abandon the Unocal pipeline project from Kazakhstan
across Afghanistan to the port of Karachi in Pakistan. But
a lot of Americans have been convinced we are there to
bring democracy and freedom to the Afghans, or at least
to stop al Qaida, when, in fact, al Qaida is operating
freely from Pakistan.

For more on the Unocal pipeline and the run-up to 9-11-2001
and the Afghan War, see

Some Americans may also believe that a troop surge
pacified Iraq when, in fact, the "success" was achieved
by paying off the Sunni Moslems in western Iraq and by
Iran restraining the militant Shiites such as al Sadr's
Mahdi Army.

In the 1980's, we gave Osama bin Laden Stinger missiles
to shoot down the Russian helicopters in Afghanistan,
creating a chain of events that resulted in the Russians
losing most of their Islamic empire.

Do you think the Russians are going to forget this? We
will have to build the Unocal pipeline over their dead
bodies. Where did Iran get medium range missiles to
threaten Israel and high-tech roadsde bombs used so
effectively against us in Iraq? Where are the roadside
bombs coming from in Afghanistan?

Joining us to answer today's five OFF-SET questions is
John C. Bogle, who founded The Vanguard Group, Inc. in
the mid-1970s.

The Vanguard Group is one of the two largest mutual
fund organizations in the world, comprising more than
100 mutual funds with current assets totaling about $950
billion. Vanguard 500 Index Fund, the largest fund in the
group, was founded by Mr. Bogle in 1975 ...

Bogle appeared on Parker Spitzer on Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010.

JAY KERNIS: Do you think President Obama has done enough
to deal with the country's financial crisis? What else
would you have him do?

JOHN BOGLE: President Obama has done mostly what's right,
despite intransigent opposition from his political
adversaries. But he should have focused more of the
available stimulus on infrastructure and mortgagees, where
the payoff in economic recovery would be more immediate.

JAY KERNIS: What do you think is the most effective way
to create more jobs?

JOHN BOGLE: In our deadlocked political system, more
stimulus, however urgent, seems unlikely. So the President
should focus on unleashing the entrepreneurial energy
of small- and medium-sized businesses through reducing
(some) regulation and creating incentives for hiring
and investment.

JAY KERNIS: On Dec. 1 [2010], we learned that the Federal
Reserve made $9 trillion in loans to major banks and Wall
Street firms during the financial crisis. What was your
reaction when you saw that figure?

JOHN BOGLE: Immediate reaction: Shock. After a moment's
reflection: Of course! We live in an interconnected
global world, and contagion can be almost immediate.
Good move, likely essential to resolving the credit crunch.

JAY KERNIS: According to a recent study commissioned by
the Council of Institutional Investors, pay practices
at major Wall Street banks likely helped drive excessive
risk-taking by executives and brought financial markets
to the brink of collapse in 2008. The study found that
total CEO compensation at major Wall Street institutions
in 2003-2007 was two to three times the level of pay at
other Fortune 50 companies during the same period. Don't
CEOs deserve whatever their boards of directors are willing
to pay them?

JOHN BOGLE: No. Boards too often revere even non-performing
CEOs; compensation consultants, in thrall to CEOs, chose
the metrics of measurement, and ratchet them up, year
after year. The system is sick.

JAY KERNIS: You come from a family that was affected by
the Great Depression. Are there any lessons from that
experience that resonate with you today -- that the rest
of us might want to pay attention to?

JOHN BOGLE: What I remember from my youth is the danger
of borrowing, and the profound psychic rewards of earning
the money to buy what one wanted. Save until you have the
money; only then, buy. Our departure from those ancient
virtues helped to get us into the financial morass we
face today.''

ELIOT SPITZER, CNN ANCHOR: He's one of the most important
figures on Wall Street over the last 50 years, but not
because of his own profits. When other folks were trying
to figure out how to make money out of your pocket, he
was figuring out how to make money for you.

On Wall Street today, it isn't so easy for regular folks
to profit. You think you're smart about your investments,
"Don't Count on It." That's the title of the latest book
from John Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard mutual funds,
the largest mutual funds in the nation. So what is his
view of Wall Street today? Joining us in the "Exchange"
tonight, Jack Bogle.

Jack, thank you for being here. I just want to preface
this by saying I am an enormous fan of yours.

JOHN BOGLE, FOUNDER AND FMR. CHMN., THE VANGUARD GROUP:
Thank you.

SPITZER: You are one of the few, honest folks on Wall
Street who always put the client first.

BOGLE: That's the way to build a good business ...

SPITZER: All right. So the notion was keep fees and
costs low?

BOGLE: And invest for the long term and ... the shareholder
-- you make a decision. Don't make it for the manager,
make it for that shareholder --

SPITZER: Explain first why this issue of fees is so
important.

BOGLE: The reason it's important is, in a very simplified
way, if the market gives an eight percent annual return,
... Wall Street takes -- the mutual fund money managers
and the traders and the marketers and the lawyers and that
whole constellation --

SPITZER: [Those] who feed out of this.

BOGLE: Yes, they're feeding away. The rent seekers, they
call them. And they take about two percent out of that
eight percent, leaving you with six. And if you compound
that over a lifetime, it means that you put up 100 percent
of the capital. You took 100 percent of the risk and you
get about 25 percent of the return. And Wall Street puts
up none of the capital. Takes none of the risk, and gets
75 percent of the return. If you think that's a good deal,
Eliot, welcome to Wall Street.

SPITZER: And that exactly is the tension, the conflict
of interests that has been adherent in so many of these
mutual fund companies for decades.

BOGLE: Exactly. The mutual fund industry has become a big
marketing industry whose objective is to raise the amount
of assets under management. The bigger you are, the more
your fees. There's a lot of leverage in those fees and
huge economies at scale as you get bigger. And the mutual
fund industry by and large has not shared those economies
to scale with investors. They've shared it with themselves.

SPITZER: But your notion was keep the fees low to give a
bigger return to the investor.

BOGLE: Exactly right and keep the transaction cost low
... And that's what the index fund does.

SPITZER: Right ...

BOGLE: And no trading costs, high tax efficiency, ...
It's a way to capture your fair share market returns,
whatever they may be.

SPITZER: OK. Now I want to switch gears and talk about
how you see our economy right now and what you think is
the underlying problem with an unemployment rate at about
9.8 percent that seems to be stuck there. A lot of money
sloshing around, but no real investment, no job creation?

BOGLE: No. There is no real investment and job creation. I
think what we have to do, and you know, I think the Obama
administration moved in the right direction with the
stimulus, but there's not going to be anymore stimulus.

The politicians down there in Washington will become, I
think, their own parody, [and they] aren't going to give
any more stimulus.

So I think we have to work [at] making, particularly for
small businesses and medium-sized businesses, it more
attractive to hire. Whether that's credits for new hiring,
whether it's investment credits, whether it's some limited
reduction in regulations, make the world easier for the
small and medium-sized businesses. The big guys can take
care of themselves ...

SPITZER: For those of us who believe the issue is lack of
aggregate demand, how do you stimulate that demand? You
said that the president had a stimulus that was OK, but
we need more of it. How would you craft another stimulus
and where would it come from?

BOGLE: We talked about when all these came up,
shovel-ready product, projects. They didn't seem to be
many shovel-ready projects. So I think we ought to move
the focus ... away from TARP and funding the bankers to
the productive part of the economy. Because in the long
run, the productive part of the economy is what America is
all about. And the financial part of the economy creates
no value and, in fact, subtracts value from the returns
of business.

SPITZER: ... The problem we have politically is that the
newly ascended Republican Party seems to reject the notion
of Keynesian economics, which is essentially what you're
talking about, which is creating that demand by having
government spend the money or buy the goods that create
... the demand. Have we rejected Keynesian economics? Is
that a bad thing to do?

BOGLE: ... We got a wonderful test going on in the United
Kingdom ... -- that's going to be a struggling economy
with huge cutbacks in the government's role in the British
economy ...

No one's ever going to be able to prove these things,
but I think you've got to try something with the best
possible prospects in this really fragile, very fragile
position in which our nation finds itself.

SPITZER: And what is your view of this whole notion of
cutting taxes for the wealthy at this moment in time?

BOGLE: Well, please. I mean, the idea, honestly of holding
up the unemployment benefits to people who haven't been
working, some for a long time, they're probably 20 million
of them ... to favor the top one percent and more likely
the top one-tenth of one percent or the top one-hundredth
of one percent of America's wealthiest people seems to me,
first, abusive, counterproductive, economically incorrect,
and even worse, Eliot, if I can fly a little higher ...,
contrary to the spirit of America which does, don't forget,
say something about promoting the general welfare.

SPITZER: And you are a Wall Street guy saying all this?

BOGLE: Yes ...''

--------------

Regarding long term unemploment, Commentator 11 wrote
on 12-21-10:

``The topic of human labor being rendered obsolete by
robots has come up from time to time. I discovered a
web site and book about this by someone named Martin Ford:

Ford founded a silicon valley software development company,
so he knows a thing or two about computers and robots ...

Commentator 12 wrote on 12-21-10:

I think the author Commentator 11 refers to is probably
spot-on when he brings up the rather unsettling prediction
that a free market (as it is currently understood and
practiced) is likely to cease to function if robotics
continue to assume much of the labor ...

Personally, I would like to see the day come where our
current monetary system might be turned upside down in a
major fundamental way ...

Commentator 13 wrote on 12-21-10:

The U.S. monetary system has been turned upside down
several times in the past, eliciting forceful responses.
The fundemental bone of contention is "Should our currency
be based on debt, with interest often being paid to money
lenders (our current system) or to holders of 'bank notes,'
or should our currency be based on something besides debt?"

Jefferson argued forcefully against debt. Hamilton was
all for debt. I have not yet read Ron Paul's book
"End The Fed" but it won't be long before interest on
the national debt is the largest budget item, exceeding
military expenditures and transferring enormous wealth
from the taxpayers to the money lenders.

Commentator 11 wrote on 12-21-10:

Today, most of us accept that technology will continue to
advance and produce things that we might currently view
as impossible. However, we still think too narrowly. We
accept that there will be new technologies, new products
and new industries, but most of us are not prepared to
accept that all this will change the basic economic rules
that we take for granted. But why wouldn't that be
the case? Is there a fundamental reason why accelerating
technology should impact nearly every aspect of our lives
-- but not impact the way the economy works?

Commentator 14 wrote on 12-21-10:

An unconditional basic income movement is gaining traction
in Germany and Brazil ...

Consider the example of a Chiropractor that would be paid
anyway, even if the client didn't have the money to pay
himself. What's to stop everyone from "purchasing" goods
and services for which they have no money, living a life
of luxury, and contributing nothing in return? (and I can
assure you there are many who would if it were possible).

The net result would be that little if anything got done,
so the goods and services available would be severely
limited ...

Commentator 11 wrote on 12-24-10:

I noted this problem as well. In real life, with the
present system, we do have this problem with medical
practitioners. Many people have virtually unlimited
access to conventional doctors without paying much extra
because their insurance covers it and the deductible is
small. This does cause some people to overuse medical care,
which causes long waits and extra cost for everyone else.

There are other examples of resources that we have decided
to give away at no cost, which causes overuse. Public
roads, highways, and parking spaces in Manhattan are the
best examples.

Commentator 13 wrote on 12-24-10:

A far more serious problem is the use of emergency rooms
by people without insurance. This is rapidly driving up
insurance rates for those with insurance. Continuing this
give-away seems to be a primary objective of those with
tea bags for brains as they mount legal challenges against
mandatory health insurance coverage. They seem to have no
problem with mandating that hospitals give free
emergency-room service.

Commentator 17 wrote on 12-24-10:

One thing that strikes me about the chiropractic example
is that it seems more people would become chiropractors
(or doctors or perform any service) because their possible
base of patients would expand to people who nowadays can
not afford such services.

But somebody has to pay for the services of the
chiropractor. If it isn't the poor person, it must be
the taxpayers.

If the economy is efficient, if products are made at a low
cost [by robots], then they can be bought by the
poorer people and impose a lower burden on the taxpayers.

---------------

Commentator 13 wrote on 12-24-10:

Here's a brief history of the contention between the
Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians:

President Andrew Jackson succeeds in destroying the
Second Bank of the United States by withdrawing U.S. funds
in 1833.

Skull and Bones Society formed at Yale.

William Huntington Russell founded the Order of Skull
& Bones in 1832 after he returned from studies in
Germany. The Russell family's business - Russell &
Co. - was the premier American opium shipper and the
third largest in the world. In the 1830s, opium became
the world's largest commercial commodity, and was the
foundation of great wealth with the smuggling of opium
into China.

Bankers offered loans to the Lincoln government at a
minimum 24 percent interest. So the Legal Tender Act of
1862 authorized the "greenback," a fiat paper currency
that was issued directly into circulation by the United
States Department of the Treasury.

The London Times printed the following: "If that
mischievous financial policy, which had its origin in
the North American Republic, should become [established],
then that Government will furnish its own money without
cost. It will pay off debts and be without a debt. It will
have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It
will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of
the civilized governments of the world. The brains and
the wealth of all countries will go to North America.

That government must be destroyed, or it will destroy
every monarchy on the globe." (Hazard Circular - London
Times 1865)

``Thomas Jefferson warned 200 hundred years ago that if
private bankers were allowed to issue America 's money,
indebtedness, foreclosure and suffering would follow. Yet,
in 1913, private bankers gained control over America's
money by the passage of the Federal Reserve Act.''

It is historic fact that the plan for the Federal Reserve
was created by banking interests in great secrecy at Jekyl
Island in 1910 ... The operations of the Federal Reserve
are secret, have no active congressional oversight, and
are not audited by the GAO or the IRS ...''

June 4, 1963

John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 11110 ... which gave
Kennedy, as President of the United States, authority to
print United States Treasury Notes.

November 22, 1963,

John F. Kennedy is murdered

Only one day after Kennedy's assassination, all the United
States notes which Kennedy had issued, were called out
of circulation.

``In an effort to paralyze the U. S. federal government,
just three presidents, Reagan and the Bushes, have incurred
most of our cureent $11 trillion national debt -- this
was not accident or stupidity; it was deliberate policy.

Paying interest on this debt as it continues to grow
should be repugnant to all of us -- what a waste of our
tax dollars. So, here is a proposal in the tradition of
President Abraham Lincoln:

Immediately pay off the entire U. S. debt with electronic
(and printed when necessary) U. S. Treasury bills,
"electronic greenbacks." These treasury notes will pay no
interest; and will be "stored" in the U. S. Treasury until
the debt-holders give the U. S. Treasury their account
numbers for "electronic greenback" direct deposit. All
interest payments on notes issued by the Federal Reserve
will be banned by law and immediately cease.

The new greenbacks will be legal tender in the U. S. and
must be accepted abroad by U. S. agencies, contractors,
and banks chartered in the U. S. no matter where they
are operating.''

The assassination attempt left the three-term congresswoman
in critical condition after a bullet passed through her
head ...

Giffords, 40, is a moderate Democrat who narrowly won
re-election in November against a tea party candidate who
sought to throw her from office over her support of the
health care law. Anger over her position became violent at
times, with her Tucson office vandalized after the House
passed the overhaul last March [2010] and someone showing
up at a recent gathering with a weapon.

Police say the shooter was in custody, and was identified
by people familiar with the investigation as Jared
Loughner, 22 ...

[Sheriff] Dupnik said Giffords was among 13 people wounded
in the melee that killed six people -- including 9-year-old
Christina Greene, 30-year-old Gifford aide Gabe Zimmerman,
and U.S. District Judge John Roll. The 63-year-old judge
had just stopped by to see his friend Giffords ...

Dupnik said the rampage ended only after two people tackled
the gunman.

The sheriff blamed the vitriolic political rhetoric that
has consumed the country, much of it occurring in Arizona.

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to
the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing
down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry
that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,"
he said. "And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become
the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and
bigotry."

Giffords expressed similar concern, even before the
shooting. In an interview after her office was vandalized,
she referred to the animosity against her by conservatives,
including Sarah Palin's decision to list Giffords' seat
as one of the top "targets" in the midterm elections.

"For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but
the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the
crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do
that, they have to realize that there are consequences to
that action," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC ...

During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords in November
[2010], Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers
where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from
office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16
rifle ...

Law enforcement officials said members of Congress reported
42 cases of threats or violence in the first three months
of 2010, nearly three times the 15 cases reported during
the same period a year earlier. Nearly all dealt with the
health care bill, and Giffords was among the targets.

A 19-year-old volunteer at the event, Alex Villec,
described how the violence unfolded.

Villec, a former staffer for the congresswoman, told The
Associated Press that the man who later turned out to be
the suspect arrived at the event wearing a black cap and
baggy pants and asking for the congresswoman.

"I told him she'll be more than happy to talk to you as
your turn comes," Villec said. The man walked away, but
returned just minutes later and burst through a table
separating Villec and Giffords from the public. Villec
said he saw him raise an arm, and then he heard gunfire.

The gunman fired at Giffords and her district director and
started shooting indiscriminately at staffers and others
standing in line to talk to the congresswoman, said Mark
Kimball, a communications staffer for Giffords ...

The shooting cast a pall over the Capitol ... Capitol
police asked members of Congress to be more vigilant about
security in the wake of the shooting. Obama dispatched
his FBI chief to Arizona ...

Doctors were optimistic about Giffords surviving as she
was responding to commands from doctors. "With guarded
optimism, I hope she will survive, but this is a very
devastating wound," said Dr. Richard Carmona, the former
surgeon general who lives in Tucson ...

Giffords was first elected to Congress amid a wave of
Democratic victories in the 2006 election, and has been
mentioned as a possible Senate candidate in 2012 and a
gubernatorial prospect in 2014.

She is married to astronaut Mark E. Kelly, who has piloted
space shuttles Endeavour and Discovery. The two met in
China in 2003 while they were serving on a committee there,
and were married in January 2007.

Sen. Bill Nelson, chairman of the Senate Commerce Space
and Science Subcommittee, said Kelly is training to be
the next commander of the space shuttle mission slated for
April [2011]. His brother is currently serving aboard the
International Space Station, Nelson said ...''

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A federal jury in Akron recently
convicted a Tennessee man of threatening to burn down the
house of then Ohio Congressman John Boccieri last year.

Other members of Congress -- including Arizona
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords -- were threatened too,
with words, bricks and, in one case, a faxed image of a
noose. The threats happened ... in the run-up to a historic
vote over federal health care.

Many blamed overheated rhetoric, cautioning threats could
escalate to violence if people on both sides of the debate
didn't ratchet back their language.

And Saturday, after learning of the attempt on Giffords'
life, some of Northeast Ohio's leaders fear they were
right.

"The rhetoric has risen to such a level that people
can no longer discuss differences in any civil way,"
U.S. Congresswoman Marcia Fudge said Saturday evening ...

Boccieri -- who lost his bid for re-election in November
[2010] -- also pointed to an incident involving then-House
Minority Leader John Boehner and former Cincinnati
Rep. Steve Driehaus. Boehner, according to news accounts,
warned that Driehaus "may be a dead man" if he voted for
health care ...

Boccieri said [that] the tension was so thick that on
the day of the health care vote, that both Boccieri and
Fudge said they feared for their safety. As he was walking
across the mall to vote in Washington, D.C., Boccieri said
he looked out at Tea Party protestors and thought: "This
could be it. Someone could have a gun in this crowd." ...

During the fall campaign, for example, Republican Sarah
Palin posted a map on her Facebook page showing where
Democrats -- including Boccieri and Giffords -- were
running.

Each was pinpointed with cross hairs, like those seen
through the scope of a gun ...

Shortly after the shooting, House members received e-mail
warnings from Capitol Hill law enforcement officials
advising them to have more security at public events and
take reasonable precautions regarding security.

Not long after, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown canceled a
public appearance today in the Cleveland area. His staff
initially said it was because of safety concerns, but
later added it was out of respect for Giffords, too ...''

Law enforcement officials continue to piece together the
facts in Saturday's shooting rampage that left a federal
judge dead and a congresswoman critically injured in
Arizona, and some are questioning whether divisive
political rhetoric may have played a role.

At least six people died and at least a dozen were
injured in the Saturday morning shooting at a Tucson,
Ariz., grocery store parking lot, in which the gunman
specifically targeted Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords,
Pima County, Arizon Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said. Giffords
was shot in the head, and the shooting continued until
citizens tackled the suspected gunman, he said.

The dead included John Roll, chief judge of the
U.S. District Court of Arizona. Also killed was Gabe
Zimmerman, 30, the congresswoman's director of community
outreach, and a 9-year-old girl. Two other Giffords
staffers were injured.

At a news conference Saturday night, a clearly emotional
Dupnik, who has been close to both Giffords and Roll,
repeatedly cited what he characterized as the "vitriol"
that has infected political discourse. He said that his
own state has become "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

There is reason to believe, he said, that the shooting
suspect "may have a mental issue," adding that people like
that "are especially susceptible to vitriol."

"That may be free speech, but it's not without
consequences," he said ...

The suspected gunman was tackled and held by people at the
event until police arrived and took him into custody. Law
enforcement sources told NPR the suspect was 22-year-old
Jared Lee Loughner ...

During an interview with MSNBC after her office was
vandalized, Giffords noted that her district was on Sarah
Palin's "crosshairs" list of targeted congressional races.

And it had been reported that in 2009, Roll and
his wife received 24-hour protection for at least a
month after receiving death threats after certifying a
multimillion-dollar lawsuit illegal immigrants had filed
against an Arizona rancher ...

About Gabrielle Giffords:

Personal

Born: June 8, 1970, in Tucson

Family: Married to Mark Kelly, a Navy pilot and astronaut
with NASA; two children

``No motives have emerged from today's senseless shooting
in Tucson, but Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has
a long history of being targeted by the Tea Party --
sometimes in violent terms.

In the run-up to 2010's heated midterm elections, Arizona
Democrat Gabrielle Giffords was placed on Sarah Palin's
"target map," released in March [2010], which featured
gun crosshairs superimposed over her target's districts
on a United States map ...

Giffords' Republican opponent in the race, Jesse Kelly,
whom she narrowly defeated, held a campaign event in
which he invited supporters to shoot a machine gun. "Get
on target for victory," an ad for the event read. "Help
remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully a
automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly," the ad continued.

As Giffords' father rushed to the hospital after his
daughter was shot, the New York Post asked him if his
daughter had any enemies. "Yeah," he said. "The whole
Tea Party." ...''

``[Maybe] you're ... interested in the on-going struggle
pertaining to two diametrically opposing political POVs
vying to steer the direction of our economy ...

I hope our planet may soon benefit from the fallout of
[the work of the] Rossi & Focardi duo (and possibly Mills &
Co.) ... In the meantime, we must contend with the reality
of the situation:

The reality of Broken Economies:

Who are we going to blame?

Versus

How do we fix the problem?

On Friday [2-18-11], Wisconsin's state and local public
employees offered to accept all of the economic concessions
called for in the budget repair bill - including Governor
Walker's pension and health care concessions, the very
items our governor originally stated are absolutely
necessary in order to solve Wisconsin's looming deficits.

The unions only asked that Scott Walker remove the
provision that does away with 50 years of collective
bargaining. Governor Walker flatly turned the offer down.

If the issue had really been about solving Wisconsin's
looming budget deficit, a budgetary solution is now at
hand. The unions have now conceded to all of Walker's key
budgetary demands.

It has become blatantly clear at this point that the
primary agenda in Walker's modus operandi was never about
balancing the budget; rather it is to get rid of unions,
particularly the right of unions to bargain collectively
[and to financially contribute to the Democratic
Party]

It is incredible to me that our governor is willing to
refuse a solution to our state's looming budget crisis
by refusing to accept the very fiscal concessions he has
constantly been calling for.

PS: 14 Wisconsin senators remain AWOL. At present all
it would it take for Scott Walker to get the entirety of
his bill passed as-is (with no negotiating), which would
include the destruction of collective bargaining would be
to nab just one "missing" senator and force him back to
the capital to complete a quorum ...''

Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker, whose bill to
kill collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions
has caused an uproar among state employees, might not be
where he is today without the Koch brothers.

Charles and David Koch are conservative titans of
industry ... For years, the billionaires have made
extensive political donations to Republican candidates
across the country and have provided millions of dollars
to ... right-wing organizations ... And one prominent
beneficiary of the Koch brothers' largess is Scott Walker.

According to Wisconsin campaign finance filings, Walker's
gubernatorial campaign received $43,000 from the Koch
Industries PAC during the 2010 election. That donation
was his campaign's second-highest, behind $43,125 in
contributions from housing and realtor groups in Wisconsin.

The Koch's PAC also helped Walker via a familiar and
much-used politicial maneuver designed to allow donors to
skirt campaign finance limits. The PAC gave $1 million
to the Republican Governors Association [RGA], which in
turn spent $65,000 on independent expenditures to support
Walker. The RGA also spent a whopping $3.4 million on TV
ads and mailers attacking Walker's opponent, Milwaukee
Mayor Tom Barrett. Walker ended up beating Barrett by 5
points. The Koch money, no doubt, helped greatly ...

Walker's plan to eviscerate collective bargaining rights
for public employees is right out of the Koch brothers'
playbook. Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity,
the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
and the Reason Foundation have long taken a very
antagonistic view toward public-sector unions.

Several of these groups have urged the eradication of
these unions. The Kochs also invited Mark Mix, president
of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation,
an anti-union outfit, to a June 2010 confab in Aspen,
Colorado; Mix said in a recent interview that he supports
Governor Walker's collective-bargaining bill.

In Wisconsin, this conservative, anti-union view is
being placed into action by lawmakers in sync with the
deep-pocketed donors who helped them obtain power ...
The Koch brothers' investment in Walker appears to be
paying off.''

NEWS ARTICLE from The Plain Dealer, 2-22-11,
By Joe Guillen, The Plain Dealer

``COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Boisterous protests intensified at
the Statehouse Tuesday as Ohio moved to the forefront of
a growing national debate surrounding Republican efforts
to curtail workers' collective bargaining rights.

About 5,500 workers - teachers, police, nurses,
electricians and others from across Ohio - swarmed the
snowy state capital by mid-afternoon. They held signs,
chanted and marched along the streets against Senate
Bill 5, a Republican-backed plan to eliminate collective
bargaining rights for state workers and restrict such
rights for employees of local governments ...

The scene mirrored those in other states where Republicans
are seeking to erode unions' power and influence.

In Wisconsin, Democratic senators failed to show up at
work Tuesday, stalling Republican Gov. Scott Walker's
efforts to weaken public employees' bargaining rights. The
Democrats have been gone since Thursday. Tens of thousands
of protesters, however, have remained.

Democrats in the Indiana House of Representatives also
skipped work on Tuesday to prohibit Republicans from
working on legislation to make Indiana a "right-to-work"
state ...

In Ohio, Democrats are so outnumbered they cannot stop
Republicans from voting on legislation ... Republicans
hold a 23-10 majority in the Senate, and a 59-40 edge in
the House. Only a simple majority is required to hold a
vote and pass a bill ...

Labor leaders at the Statehouse on Tuesday said ...
the changes Republicans seek are an attack on the middle
class, and political payback aimed at unions that typically
support Democrats.

The union leaders said Republicans have offered no
evidence their plan will save money. "All workers, union
and non-union, are starting to smell something rotten in
Columbus," said Tim Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO.

Leaders for Ohio's police and firefighters urged lawmakers
to slow down and gather more information about the ...
proposal, which would eliminate binding arbitration for
safety forces.

"This bill is being rushed through the legislature," said
Jay McDonald, president of the Fraternal Order of Police of
Ohio. "There's no compelling evidence or reason to change
binding arbitration as it is today." ... McDonald,
Burga and other labor leaders said they are willing to
negotiate with Republicans ...''

We have witnessed a flurry of legislative activity at
the state and national levels recently that call for
eliminating public employees' collective-bargaining rights,
curtailing environmental regulations, limiting access for
women to family planning and abortion, and cutting domestic
programs. Lawmakers insist they have a public mandate from
the November [2010] elections.

So what was the national voter turnout? A paltry 41.6
percent.

Looking at states with freshman senators and congressmen
with Tea Party support, this number is shocking. For
example,

In Utah, where Mike Lee was elected, voter turnout was
38.5 percent.

[In] Florida, with a new governor and Sen. Marco Rubio,
voter turnout was 42.6 percent.

In Illinois and New York, with five new freshman
congressmen each, voter turnout was 42.5 percent and 35.5
percent, respectively.

Indiana, 38.2 percent;

and Texas, the worst of all, 27.1 percent.

Here in Ohio, we were higher, with 45.8 percent; Wisconsin
had 49.5 percent.

Yes, the truth is there are no mandates, and although the
Tea Party is a presence in America's political climate,
members are in the minority. What will the silent majority
do? ...''

NEWS ARTICLE from The Washington Post, 2-28-11,
By Peter Whoriskey and Amy Gardner

``State and local workers earn about 4 percent less in
wages than similarly educated workers at private companies,
according to a study by John Schmitt at the Center for
Economic and Policy Research that echoes other findings ...

Union supporters assert that lower pay for government
workers shows that they are not demanding too much.

"There are constraints on government worker pay, and they
are working," said Bill Raabe, director of collective
bargaining and member advocacy for the National Education
Association, one of the nation's largest unions.

Raabe also cautioned against blaming the government workers
for state budget shortfalls, which he said were largely
caused by a recession precipitated in part by the excesses
of Wall Street.

"Our members ... are people making $30,000, $40,000 or
$50,000 who are being asked to bear the brunt of serious
mistakes made by million- and billionaires."

So far, some recent polls have shown the public leaning in
favor of government workers having collective-bargaining
rights and maintaining the essence of a union.

A USA Today/Gallup poll found, for example, that 61 percent
of Americans are opposed to a bill that would take away
some collective-bargaining rights of public unions. And
a poll in Wisconsin by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research
found that 74 percent of voters opposed removing state
workers' collective-bargaining rights, as long as they
agree to cover more for their health care and pensions
...''

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Wages paid to Ohio's teachers dropped
nearly 4 percent in recent years while teachers across the
country saw pay increases, according to a new study that
criticizes a Republican-backed effort to weaken public
workers' collective bargaining rights.

Innovation Ohio ... also found that student achievement
suffers in states where teachers are not required to
collectively bargain their contracts.

"If teachers are already agreeing to the kind of reforms
we need to improve the system and student performance,
there is no compelling reason to repeal or weaken a law
that has been in place since the Reagan administration,"
Dale Butland, spokesman for Innovation Ohio, said.

Innovation Ohio officially launched today with the
release of its analysis of education and Ohio's collective
bargaining law. Janetta King, a deputy chief of staff for
policy under former Democratic Governor Ted Strickland,
is the organization's president. Former State Rep. Stephen
Dyer, a Democrat from the Akron area, was a primary author
of the analysis ...

Innovation Ohio did not reach specific conclusions about
the economic impact of Senate Bill 5.

It found Ohio's teachers, on average, saw a pay cut of 4
percent in 2008-2009. The national average over that time
was a 2 percent increase, according to Innovation Ohio.

NEWS ARTICLE from The Plain Dealer, 2-27-11,
By Maria Maisto and Matthew Williams

``Go to college to learn what Senate Bill 5 will do:

Rather than speculate about what might happen if Senate
Bill 5 eliminates public employee collective bargaining in
Ohio, legislators should study what has actually happened
as a result of one group of public employees having been
denied this right for the past 28 years.

Current Ohio law specifically denies collective-bargaining
rights to graduate students and part-time faculty
("adjuncts"), who now constitute the majority of the
faculty at public colleges and universities statewide.
At community colleges, they can constitute as much as 80
percent of the faculty.

These so-called "part-time" teachers and researchers do
work that requires full-time effort -- for poverty-level
wages, no benefits, no access to the rights and
responsibilities of tenure, and minimal institutional
support. Most aren't even provided desks or computers.

No longer just practitioners bringing "real world"
skills to classrooms, adjuncts teach most of the critical
developmental and required core courses, like English and
math, even as institutions systematically deprive them of
the tools and conditions they need to succeed.

Meanwhile, college costs, which include executive salaries
and marketing budgets, have steadily risen and educational
outcomes have suffered in the form of declining student
success, employers upset with the skill levels of college
graduates and everyone concerned about the cost -- and
value -- of a college education.

Adjuncts earn $12,000 to $24,000 annually for work
that is part-time in name only. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics asserts that people with equivalent education,
responsibility and experience average $65,000 per
year. Often marked by doubled or tripled workloads to avoid
poverty, adjuncts' situations demonstrate to students the
many ways education doesn't pay.

Anyone who cares about the quality of higher education
should consider it indefensible that many faculty
must teach 15 to 24 courses annually for economic
survival. Besides classroom time, college instruction
requires time for class preparation, grading, curricular
and professional development, and frequent consultation
with students with increasingly diverse needs.

Professors must be technological experts, mentors, job
coaches and, in the post- Virginia Tech/Tucson era, first
responders. None of this essential nonclassroom work is
done consistently well when adjuncts do it without pay, or
when so many faculty members have to take on unsustainable
workloads.

Adjuncts who cannot work this way are driven out
of the profession, subjecting students to frequent
faculty turnover and depriving institutions of talented
educators. Those who can tolerate these conditions usually
have income and benefits through a spouse, family or other
job -- or sometimes rely on public assistance. Adjuncts'
inability to compel their employers to support their work
properly thus leads to higher education leeching resources
from other sectors of the community.

Fiscal responsibility is not just about lowering costs
but about meeting obligations while spending resources
wisely. Courses taught by adjunct and regular faculty have
exactly the same value on transcripts and the tuition is
exactly the same for both, yet the "savings" reaped from
paying adjuncts less do not get passed along to students
as reduced tuition. Instead, the teaching and learning
conditions of adjuncts and their students are simply
substandard. Without the prospect of collective bargaining,
Ohio institutions have had no incentive to improve them.

In 2008, the then-vice president for human resources at
the University of Akron, A.G. Monaco, described adjuncts as
"a highly educated working poor." ... He recognized that
higher education has become addicted to the penny-wise,
pound-foolish strategy of exploiting adjunct faculty. Like
most addictions, this one has blinded institutions and
legislators to the deep and wide-reaching ways in which
it harms individuals and communities.

Without access to collective bargaining, Ohio's adjuncts
have been set up for demoralization, burnout or failure,
unless they are willing and able to donate most of their
services. In either case, they are subject to arbitrary
administrative or political decisions ...

In its treatment of adjunct faculty, Ohio has had 28 years
to prove that collective bargaining is not necessary. It
has failed miserably.

If the state really wants to effect positive change in
collective-bargaining law, it should extend access to
collective bargaining to all higher education faculty
rather than seek to ensure that all public sector employees
and, by extension, all of Ohio's citizens, experience the
degradation that the denial of that right has inflicted on
adjuncts and students. [In other words, the kleptocrats
want to turn Ohio into a "right to work" state]

Maisto, an adjunct at Cuyahoga Community College, is
a founder and the president of New Faculty Majority
(NFM), a national, nonprofit advocacy group for adjunct
faculty. Williams, a former adjunct, serves on the Summit
County Republican Party Executive Committee and is vice
president of NFM.''

``Local union leaders may be disappointed and in disbelief,
but they are energized for a longer fight to protect
collective bargaining in Ohio and the middle class.

Wednesday [3-2-11], the Republican-controlled Ohio Senate
passed the controversial Senate Bill 5 that will restrict
the collective bargaining rights of thousands of teachers,
police officers, teachers and public employees. The
bill ... now moves onto the state House, which also is
Republican-controlled.

Republican Gov. John Kasich has said he supports the bill.

Dave Woods, president of the Lorain Education Association,
was in Columbus after snagging a seat in the standing-room
only Senate hearing chamber and listened to the speeches
and debates, thinking how bad it would be if the bill
passed. He learned his worst fears had come to fruition
on his drive back to Lorain County.

Woods said "It's a wrong bill that wipes out 30 years
of peaceful negotiations and terminates what took a long
time to craft. This is not about the budget or finances
or even the economy. This is a direct attack on unions,
and it is purely politically motivated ...

NEWS ARTICLE from The Plain Dealer, 3-2-11,
By Joe Guillen, The Plain Dealer

``Ohio Senate Republicans pass ... [SB5]

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- After three weeks of raucous debate that
drew thousands of protesters to the state Capitol, the Ohio
Senate on Wednesday [passed SB5] ... drastically reducing
collective bargaining rights for Ohio's public workers ...

The bill now moves to the House of Representatives, which
has a 59-40 Republican majority ...

Senate Bill 5 has thrust Ohio into the national spotlight,
along with Wisconsin and other states where workers'
rights are under [attack] ...''

The bill would overhaul Ohio's nearly 30-year-old
collective bargaining law. Democrats and unions have
pledged to put the bill before voters if it also passes
the House and the governor signs it into law ...

The bill ... bans public workers from striking, establishes
penalties for striking -- including jail time ...

"This law is not only unjust, it is unconscionable,"
Sen. Nina Turner, a Cleveland Democrat, said. "But it
is also un-American. It strips middle class Americans of
their rights." ...

Opponents also worried about the impact on safety
forces. Union leaders for police and firefighters said
the law would leave it up to management whether quality of
equipment, such as bulletproof vests, could be bargained.

"This bill provides for our safety to be contracted out
to the lowest bidder," said Jay McDonald, president of
the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio ...

John Anthony, a member of the Ohio Civil Service Employees
Association at the Statehouse Wednesday, said union
workers will be back to protest when the bill is heard
in the House ... "There's going to be a backlash on the
Republican Party."''

NEWS ARTICLE from The Plain Dealer, 3-3-11,
By Stephen Koff, The Plain Dealer

``WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Ohio's Sherrod Brown created buzz
this afternoon by going on the U.S. Senate floor to
decry efforts in Ohio and Wisconsin to bust public union
bargaining rights -- and noting tyrants in the last century
who also fought the unions. "That would include Hitler
And Stalin, and more recently, Mubarak in Egypt. These
autocrats in history don't want independent unions." ...''

May Day was first celebrated as an international day
of labor in New York in the 1880s. Hitler made it an
official paid holiday, not just a negotiated day off, on
May 1, 1933 -- and used it to rally for his regime and
industrialization. William Shirer (The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich), who was there, called it "an elaborate
piece of trickery."

The next day, on May 2, 1933, unions were dissolved, their
assets were confiscated, their offices were occupied and
their leaders were arrested. Hitler then outlawed strikes,
abolished collective bargaining and established the German
Labor Front, a corrupt party organization ...

Mubarak does not belong in the same category as Hitler and
Stalin. But his government did routinely suppress worker
protests by force. The government-run Egyptian Trade Union
Federation was given a monopoly on labor organization
in 1957 by the Trade Union Act, which prohibits union
freedoms.

Brown's statement about tyrants and unions ... is
historically accurate. We rate Brown's statement as True.''

``AFL-CIO's Trumka: No American Should Face Choice Between
Rights, Job

SUMMARY

Judy Woodruff talks to Richard Trumka, president of the
AFL-CIO ...

Many AFL-CIO members would be affected by
pending state-level legislation that would cut
collective-bargaining rights for public employees.

Transcript

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... In Ohio yesterday, workers gathered as
the Republican-controlled state Senate passed a measure
that would restrict the collective bargaining rights of all
unions. Known as Senate Bill 5, it would affect roughly
350,000 teachers, university professors, firefighters,
police officers and other public employees. The bill
would ban strikes by public workers and penalize those
who participate in walkouts.

Automatic pay raises would disappear and future wage
increases would be based on merit, not seniority. Unionized
workers could not negotiate on health care, sick time or
pension benefits.

It's one of a number of measures backed by Republican
governors in several states that challenge the very notion
of traditional bargaining with public sector unions ...

In Wisconsin, where Senate Democrats fled the state two
weeks ago to avoid a vote on a similar bill, the deadlock
remains. Reports said both sides are talking about a
compromise ...

One late-breaking development in Wisconsin: Gov. Walker
announced this afternoon that he plans to start laying
off state employees tomorrow unless there's an agreement.

Well, we talk about some pivotal questions facing labor
now with its most prominent leader. He is Richard Trumka,
president of the AFL-CIO, a voluntary federation of 57
national and international labor unions, many of them
subject to the changes outlined in our tape piece.

We invited governors from half-a-dozen states, including
Wisconsin and Ohio, to participate in tonight's
discussion. All declined our invitation ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: But let's start with this announcement
today from Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin that he's
ready to send out those layoff notices unless there's some
kind of an agreement. Is that a price worth paying? ...

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, first of all, it's the most
outrageous thing that he's done.

You heard him say that laying off was something we
shouldn't do in today's economy, and yet, he's putting
this choice to those workers in Wisconsin: Either give up
your rights, or get laid off. Give up your job.

Now, no American should be put in that position. This isn't
about the economics, Judy. ... The unions have already
agreed to the exact concessions that he's asked for. This
is about him trying to take away the rights of workers to
come together to bargain for a middle-class life.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But Gov. Walker's argument -- and I know
you have heard him make it ...

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, quite frankly, I have listened to
him several times, and I never heard him explain why he
wants to do away with the workers' rights to come together
to bargain for a middle-class life.

But let me give you these facts. The five states in the
United States that prohibit collective bargaining by
public employees, ... have a cumulative debt of $222
billion. Collective bargaining didn't cause that.

Look, this isn't about public employees. This was caused
by the crisis and the recession that we have. We have 15
million people out of work. Put them back to work; they
pay taxes; the economy starts to hum; and all of us start
to ... live better.

And this governor, instead of creating the jobs that he was
elected to do, is now trying to destroy more middle-class
jobs [and] hurt the Wisconsin economy even more.

JUDY WOODRUFF: [Scott Walker] said ... public workers
should be willing to give some.

RICHARD TRUMKA: Well, you know, they have been.

He asked for cuts, and they agreed to all the cuts that
he asked for. Remember this. Those public employees are
citizens as well. This is a concerted campaign by a number
of Republican governors to vilify public employees ...

Walker first said that Wisconsin employees are paid too
much. Well, now we know from study after study that the
public employees are paid less than private employees. And
then he said it's about the pension plan. And then we
find out that his pension plan is nearly fully funded,
100 percent of assets versus liabilities.

And then he says, well, I need these cuts. And they agreed
to them. And then, again, the most outrageous thing that
he did was say that to these employees, I'm going to lay
you off unless you give up your rights.

Now, no American should be subject to that. We ought to be
doing more to build the middle-class, not less. And what
he's trying to do is take [from] nurses, firefighters,
EMTs, snow plow drivers, their ability to come together
to make their way into the middle class.

Take John Kasich. He says everybody has to share. When he
came in, he gave his senior staff a 30 percent increase in
wages, and then he turns around to public employees and
says, now, I want to strip you, not only of the pensions
you have been promised and the health care that you have
been promised, but I want to take away your ability to
negotiate for those.

Look, in a modern society, in a global economy, the
companies that succeed are the companies that sit down with
their employees, and they say, we have a problem. Let's
solve it. The old way of doing things, the Kasich way,
the Walker way, is saying, employees, you have nothing to
offer. Shut up and sit down and accept what we give you ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... how worried are you that, if Governor
Walker wins this argument in Wisconsin, ... that it
... makes stronger the argument against unions in these
other states? ...

RICHARD TRUMKA: ... This is about a governor taking away
the rights of his employees to come together to bargain
for a middle-class way of life. ... Imagine what the
country would be like if there were no unions.

Gov. Walker could come in one day and say, oh, in order
to ... to balance the budget, ... employers can pay women
less for ... the same work that men do, or we're going to
do away with overtime, or we're going to do away with the
[child] age limit.

Those are the kind of things that are at stake, because
teachers ..., you know what they bargain for? They
bargain for smaller class size. You know what police
bargain for? They bargain for equipment that will save
their lives out on the street ...

Now, a police officer knows what [he] needs. A firefighter
knows what [he] needs. And a teacher bargaining for a
smaller class size is trying to bargain for all of us.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, do you view Wisconsin as a kind of
Waterloo for these issues that you care so deeply about?

RICHARD TRUMKA: You know, any time that they're taking any
employee, any worker's rights away, and saying to them,
as Gov. Walker did, you have to give up either your job
or your rights, we take that seriously, and we're going
to stand with them and fight ...

And I will say this to you. We will stand with those
employees. They want to fight for their rights. They want
to fight for the middle class. They want to fight for the
opportunity to get to the middle class. And we're going
to be with them every step of the way.

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... So, what do you say to American --
to private-sector workers who are watching right now --
who think public workers get a better deal?

RICHARD TRUMKA: So, in some cases, they might, but, in most
cases, they don't ... Here's what I would say to them. In
America, we have never, as a country, looked up and said,
that person over there has a pension. Let's take it away
from them.

What we as a country have always said is, they don't have
a pension. Let's figure out a way to get them one.

We're the richest nation on the face of the
earth. Corporate America had record profits. It's not that
we can't afford this. We need a shared sacrifice. Workers
have shared. They have given up their jobs. They have
lost their homes ... It's time for to us come together
and create jobs ...

JUDY WOODRUFF: Rich Trumka, the president of AFL-CIO,
thank you very much for talking with us.

If you work for somebody else for a living and you resent
unions, the solution for what ails you isn't to derail
the hard-earned gains of organized labor.

What you need to do is to join a union, so that you,
too, will be treated with the fairness and respect every
hardworking human being deserves ...

Public union employees are now fighting for their working
lives in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and New Jersey. The
battle is over their right to collectively bargain with
their employers for wages and benefits, which is why
unions exist.

Conservative legislators in these states are trying to
obliterate public employee unions, and they're using
the most cynical of strategies: Turn workers against
workers -- union versus nonunion -- and then maybe no
one will notice the ever-widening abyss between the ...
wealthiest Americans and everybody else ...

Conservatives have their supporters, too. "Wisconsin is
ground zero," said Tim Phillips, president of Americans
for Prosperity, a Tea Party faction. "I think it is going
to determine largely whether the pampered nature of these
public employees is finally reined in."

New York Times reporter Eric Lipton pointed out what
Phillips forgot to say:

"What Mr. Phillips did not mention was that his
Virginia-based nonprofit group [Americans for Prosperity],
whose budget surged to $40 million in 2010 from $7 million
three years ago, was created and financed in part by
the secretive billionaire brothers Charles G. and David
H. Koch.

[New York Times, 2-23-11: ``Phillips said ... that his
group is working with activists and officials in Ohio,
Indiana, and Pennsylvania to urge them to curtail union
benefits'']

"State records also show that Koch Industries, their
energy and consumer products conglomerate based in Wichita,
Kan., was one of the biggest contributors to the election
campaign of Gov. Scott Walker ..."

As for Phillips' claim of "pampered" public employees,
various studies, including one by University of Wisconsin
economics professors Keith Bender and John Heywood, found
that state and local employees' wages and salaries are,
on average, 6.8 percent lower than those for private-sector
workers of equal education.

The professors also found that public employees' earnings
have been in relative decline for 20 years.

Still, no one, including union workers, is saying
concessions should not be made. Unions have been
making concessions for some time now, including where I
work. Guild members are in our second year of voluntary
pay cuts, and I've not heard a single colleague suggest
we should stop sharing the burden.

That's the thing about those so-called "pampered" union
workers. They don't exist. But the mythology comes in handy
when you're looking to redirect the blame for these tough
economic times. [The thieves take the money, and their
victims are punished.]

A wise man once wrote, "The working classes didn't bring
this on. It was the big boys that thought the financial
drunk was going to last forever and overbought, overmerged
and overcapitalized."

That came from Will Rogers on Oct. 25, 1931.

Today, he'd be accused of engaging in class warfare.

I am reminded of the union mantra: "They only call it
class warfare when we fight back."''

MADISON, Wisconsin -- On a prank call that quickly spread
across the Internet, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was duped
into discussing his strategy to cripple public employee
unions, promising never to give in and joking that he would
use a baseball bat ... to go after political opponents.

Walker believed the caller was a conservative billionaire
named David Koch, but it was actually a liberal
blogger. The two talked for at least 20 minutes --
a conversation in which the governor described several
potential ways to pressure Democrats to return to the
Statehouse and revealed that his supporters had considered
secretly planting people in pro-union protest crowds to
stir up trouble ...

In the call, the governor said he was ratcheting up the
pressure on Senate Democrats to return to the Capitol a
week after they fled to block the legislation. He said he
supported a move to require them to come to the Capitol
to pick up their paychecks rather than have the money
deposited directly.

He also floated an idea to lure Democratic senators back
to the Capitol for negotiations and then have the Senate
quickly pass the bill while they are in talks ...

Walker said aides were reviewing whether the GOP could
hold a vote if Democrats were not physically in the Senate
chamber but elsewhere in [the building] ...

Democrats seized on Walker's recorded comments as evidence
that the governor plans to go beyond budget cuts to
crushing unions.

"This isn't about balancing the budget. This is about
a political war," State Rep. Jon Richards of Milwaukee
yelled Wednesday on the floor of the state Assembly.

In the call, Walker said he expected the anti-union
movement to spread across the country and he had spoken
with the governors of Ohio and Nevada. The man pretending
to be Koch seemed to agree, telling Walker, "You're the
first domino."

"Yep, this is our moment," Walker responded.

The remarks showed Walker's private relationship with David
Koch. He and his brother, Charles, own Koch Industries
Inc., which is the largest privately owned company in
America and has significant operations in Wisconsin.

Its political action committee gave $43,000 to Walker's
campaign, and David Koch gave $1 million to the Republican
Governors' Association, which funded ads attacking Walker's
opponent in last year's election.

The Kochs also give millions to support Americans For
Prosperity, a conservative business group that [has]
launched a $320,000 television ad campaign in favor of
Walker's legislation ...''

A contingent of union officials representing prison workers
arrived in Columbus on Tuesday to hear Gov. John Kasich's
State of the State speech, only to learn that a report
was circulating that the Grafton Correctional Institution
would be sold to a private vendor.

"This was a hit to the gut, and it gives a sick feeling,"
said Bobbie Peters, president of the Ohio Civil Service
Employees Association chapter at Grafton Correctional.

"I don't know how it will stimulate the economy if all
of the profits go to a private company out of state,"
she said.

Gov. John Kasich wants to generate $200 million by selling
Grafton Correctional and four other prisons to private
vendors, according to budget proposals obtained by the
Dayton Daily News ...

"We're all very concerned. We're sick," said Barb Davis,
a guidance counselor at the prison on state Route 83.

Another employee, Tom Thompson, said he is worried about
what could happen if he loses his job of 15 years.

"We have three kids in school, and my wife and I just built
a house," Thompson said. "The scary part is that if Senate
Bill 5 passes, no one would have bumping rights."

That means an employee with two years at another prison
could keep his or her job while Thompson, with 15 years
of experience, loses his.

Peters, the union president, said she also is worried
that prison workers would lose their ability to transfer
to other prisons if Senate Bill 5 passes and Grafton
Correctional is [sold] ...

Two of Ohio's 31 prisons, the North Coast Correctional
Treatment Facility in Grafton and the Lake Erie
Correctional Institution in Conneaut are run by Management
& Training Corp., a private vendor out of Utah.

Contact Cindy Leise at cleise@chroniclet.com.

A commentator wrote:

... If we continue to sell-off or contract-out public
services to private corporations we will become an
oligarchy and be effectively governed by for profit big
business.

Since the bottom line of any business is profit, it is the
business' best interests to keep wages minimal, benefits
cheap, and pensions that are hardly livable.

Is this what we really want as a society? Is the national
craze of 'Pension Envy' going to infect our ability to
see the big picture and long term negative effects on all
workers if this scenario happens?''

``As a former Republican aide in the Wisconsin State
Senate, part of my job was to help read the governor, and
advise my senator accordingly. If I were still advising
a Republican state senator, this is what I'd say right
now ...

This governor is not hard to read. He's a giant fiery
ball of ambition. When he sneezes he compares it to how
Reagan sneezed. His first major act, after netting a modest
52 percent in a GOP wave election, was to pick the most
dangerous and inflammatory political fight he could think
of. His next major act was to propose a budget that might
get him re-elected in Texas, but not Wisconsin. Why?

Clearly he doesn't care about getting re-elected in
Wisconsin. He doesn't care about protests, or poll numbers,
or recalls. He barely even cares if what he's proposing
passes. So long as he gets attention for proposing it.

Scott Walker is driving a fast bus to Washington, estimated
time of arrival 2012 ...

I'm not the only political watcher walking around Madison
wondering what's holding the GOP caucuses together on
the Walker-for-Vice-President express ...

It requires only a two-year sense of history to identify
the last photogenic gubernatorial novice who turned into
a conservative folk hero when a presidential candidate
needed some far-right street cred ...''

Breaking news right now. It just keeps getting worse. The
last of the three reactors of the Fukushima nuclear
power plant in northern Japan is now the scene of an
explosion. This was reported just minutes ago on NHK,
the Japanese television ...

SPITZER: If Japan's nuclear emergency continues, fears
about the safety of nuclear energy are growing here at
home. Some 100 reactors in operation across the country,
can we risk the president's push to build more?

Jeffrey Sachs is here joining us. He's the director of
the Earth Institute at Columbia University ...

Jeff ... Are they about to dive into a precipice in terms
of their equity markets?

JEFFREY SACHS, DIRECTOR, EARTH INSTITUTE: Well, the equity
markets are reflecting this huge loss of wealth. But I
think the economy, as devastated as it is in that area,
probably will recover nationwide.

The experiences even with these terrible, terrible hits
like this one, the Kobe earthquake in 1995, the Chilean
earthquake last year, an economy as a whole, if it's not a
desperate situation like you were talking about in Haiti,
but a rather modern and well- managed economy like Japan's
should bounce back ...

SPITZER: And if I'm right, the prefecture which is the
... governmental unit where these tsunami hit and where
the power plants are, only constitutes two percent of the
total Japanese economy ...

SACHS: Yes ... the Japanese economy as a whole is very
large. And even when the estimates of $200 or 300 or $400
billion of losses are given, that should be compared with
the $6 trillion annual output ...

SPITZER: They have the resources to bounce back ...

SACHS: And even they have some spare capacity that they'll
be able to draw upon. That was not an economy running at
the very edge of employment ...

SPITZER: Meaning they'll be able to borrow to spend
the money.

SACHS: They will be borrowing, of course ...

SPITZER: All right. Now I'm going to ask you to do
something that may seem virtually impossible at this
precise moment in time. You are, ... -- correct me if
I'm wrong -- a huge fan of nuclear power.

SACHS: Well --

SPITZER: You defend it ...

SACHS: You know, I believe that we'll see after this
also in Japan, in China, in the United States and Europe,
that nuclear power will remain part of the mix ...

Nuclear power, we have more than 100 nuclear power plants
in this country that have run safely for decades. We had,
of course, the Three Mile Island disaster. But even there,
there wasn't a massive loss of life. Just four or five
incidents. And so, nuclear power on the whole is safe
to now resist a 9.0 earthquake, one of the biggest in
modern history, biggest in Japan in 300 years, and a giant
tsunami ...

SPITZER: ... France is what? Eighty percent of its
energy --

SACHS: For electricity?

SPITZER: Yes, for electricity is nuclear powered ...

SPITZER: Quickly, in the last moments we have left, our
domestic economy, will it be affected by what's going on
in Japan? ...

SACHS: I don't think the Japanese events, as horrible as
they are, are going to do much here at all ...

We have a lot of crazy policies going on in Washington. One
of them is that the Republicans are cutting the science
and the warning systems that protect us from this kind of
disaster ...

The majority leader, Eric Cantor ... says we have no
money to monitor earthquakes and tsunamis and to keep
the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration
running.

What is he talking about? Tax a few rich people, [and]
easily pay for what would keep the 300 million of us safe.

They're making terrible decisions. And this should be
a wakeup call to our Congress to stop being so anti-
scientific, to stop neglecting these powerful forces of
nature ...

SPITZER: Jeff, you're saying you want a heads up before
that tsunami comes over the coastline?

SACHS: I think it would be nice if we had some science
and monitoring here and not to cut these agencies ...

SPITZER: Well, look, my editorial comment is not only are
you exactly correct but where the cuts are being discussed
is in the worst possible place. It's actually where the
investments for the future [need] to be made ...''

[It's embarassing when a prominent Congressional tea
bagger publicly displays her ignorance of where the battles
of Lexington and Concord were fought, but it is a serious
problem when apparently the majority of those with tea
bags for brains want to cut spending with no idea that
the United States can not afford its empire, especially
oil wars like the military adventure in Afghanistan to
secure the "Unocal" pipeline.

For more on the Unocal pipeline and the run-up to the
Afghan War, see]

``Marcia Fudge on Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 in an interview
on C-SPAN said "There are corporations in this nation,
some of the biggest corporations in this nation, who do
not pay taxes."

Early this month, Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge of
Warrensville Heights appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington
Journal," public affairs television program where viewers
phoned in to ask her questions.

A caller who identified himself as James, an Akron
small-business owner, discussed some of the tax write-offs
he uses as a small businessman, and said larger businesses
"game the system" by writing off things like parties,
food and clothes.

Fudge agreed with him, calling for an overhaul of corporate
tax policy, saying: "There are corporations in this nation,
some of the biggest corporations in this nation, who do
not pay taxes."

"It is not that they are cheating," Fudge continued ...
We have given them tools."

We thought examining Fudge's tax claim would be worthwhile,
since representatives of some of the nation's biggest
companies, such as Cincinnati's Procter & Gamble, argue
that Congress should be cutting business taxes ...

Are some large U.S. businesses not paying taxes, as
Fudge claims?

To back up her assertion, Fudge's office cites media
reports about particular companies -- like General Electric
and Bank of America -- that did not pay 2009 taxes as
well as a July 2008 report from Congress' Government
Accountability Office that showed it's relatively common
for big companies to pay no taxes.

Between 1998 to 2005, GAO found that about 72 percent of
large foreign controlled companies and 55 percent of large
U.S. controlled companies reported zero tax liability for
at least one year.

About 57 percent of foreign controlled large companies
and 42 percent of U.S. large companies paid no taxes in
two or more years, and a third of the foreign companies
and one quarter of their U.S. counterparts paid no taxes
for at least four of those years.

Just 45 percent of large U.S. companies and 28 percent of
foreign companies reported a tax liability for each of
the eight years. The report defined large companies as
those with at least $250 million in assets, or at least
$50 million in receipts ...

The nation's big business representatives don't dispute
the report's findings, even as they stress it should
not be misconstrued to mean businesses are evading taxes
they owe ... [Most of the tax liability was probably
eliminated by campaign contributions, lobbyyists for the
kleptocrats, etc. Moammar Gadhafi probably pays no taxes
in Libya either -- all perfectly legal. And what about
the oil depletion tax credit?]

Our research finds solid ground beneath her claim that
some large U.S. companies don't pay taxes. That's why we
rate her statement as True.''

Kasich said last week that he wants to radically reduce
state aid to local governments because, hey, the federal
government ended "revenue sharing" years ago.

What Kasich didn't say is that revenue sharing was a
Republican idea; that it was one of Richard M. Nixon's
signature policies; and that Nixon, when signing federal
revenue sharing into law in 1972, said it would mean "lower
property taxes or lower sales taxes or lower income taxes."

Isn't the opposite also arguable -- that limiting or ending
revenue sharing ... will lead to higher local property
taxes and [higher] local sales taxes and [higher] local
income taxes?...

Then there's this: In 2005, Republicans abolished the
property tax on business inventories and equipment --
a huge goal of business lobbies. The "tangible personal
property tax" was a LOCAL tax.

What, in effect, GOP legislators and then-Gov. Bob Taft did
was forbid schools and local governments to keep levying
that tax. For most businesses, that property tax was last
collected in 2008; not a penny had ever gone to Columbus.

Statehouse Republicans made two related moves. One, they
imposed a new commercial activity tax (CAT) on business,
while abolishing, for most businesses, the state "franchise
tax" Ohio had long charged corporations.

And they decided in 2005 to make up, via reimbursement
from Columbus, some of what schools and local governments
lost from repeal of the tangible property tax ...

Last week, unveiling his proposed 2011-13 state budget,
Kasich said he wants to end those state tangible property
tax reimbursements ahead of schedule.

That's where Statehouse forgetfulness figures in. When
Republicans abolished the tangible property and corporate
franchise taxes, and imposed the CAT, the Ohio Business
Roundtable said those "reforms" would produce "78,500 new
jobs by 2010."

According to data from the Department of Job & Family
Services, Ohio's total nonagricultural employment in July
2005 -- just after legislators passed pro-business "reform"
-- was 5,435,600. For the latest month available, February
2011, Ohio's total was 5,081,900 -- a loss of more than
350,000 jobs. ...